Some current retail establishments include at least one store that has a plurality of different point of sale (POS) lanes or cashiers where customers can make purchases. It is not uncommon for the devices at each of the POS lanes to be connected to one another in what is referred to as a back office portion of the store. In such a set-up, POS lanes often include computerized registers or other devices that run POS applications and the back office may be connected to the POS devices through a network, which can either be a hardwired network or a wireless network. The back office components often run a back office program that can be used to configure some of the point of sale components and to aggregate sales data, and other data, from the point of sale components.
It is also common for retail organizations to include a plurality of different stores. The back office components of each of the different stores may be connected to one another at a headquarters facility that runs a headquarters system. The headquarters system often aggregates sales and other data transmitted to it form the retail locations by the back office components of each of the stores.
The retail establishments are often required to support a variety of different payment methods. For instance, most retail establishments are able to accept cash and checks as payment options, but they can also often accept credit cards or debit cards as well. In accepting credit card or debit card payments, the retail establishments are often required to interact with a payment processor (which may be an entity that handles payments for various banks, or which may be the bank itself) in conducting sales transactions. There are a variety of different types of credit cards and debit cards. Some are magnetic stripe cards where information is read by a magnetic strip reader at the point of sale. Other cards are chip cards which include an embedded integrated circuit chip that interacts with a chip card reader at the point of sale. The chip cards often include memory that stores a fairly large amount of data, and it includes components that can be programmed, that include a relatively high degree of security, and that can be read.
During an electronic funds transfer transaction (e.g., a credit card or debit card transaction), there may be several communication cycles between the card reader and the payment processor. These cycles may be used to authorize or validate the card and then authorize or validate the payment amount charged to the card, among other things.
There are currently a variety of different payment processors that handle payment processing for chip card payments. Each of them currently specifies a given hardware reader that is to be used in transmitting data from the chip card to the payment processor. That is, each payment processor specifies a hardware device (for reading data from the chip card) that it will support. While the payment processors may not, themselves, manufacture the hardware reader devices they specify, they often contract with hardware manufacturing companies that do manufacture the devices.
Therefore, if a retailer wishes to use a given chip card payment processor, that retailer must currently buy chip card the hardware device specified by that given payment processor. This requires the applications at the point of sale, in the back office, and often at the headquarters, to be hard coded to work with only a single device driver.
EMV is a standard for interoperation of integrated circuit cards (chip cards) and integrated circuit (IC) capable POS terminals and automatic teller machines (ATMs) for authenticating credit and debit card payments. The EMV standard defines the interaction at the physical, electrical, data and application levels between IC cards (or chip cards) and IC card processing devices (or readers) for financial transactions. IC card systems based on the EMV standard are being used at various locations and may also be referred to as “IC credit” systems and “Chip and PIN” systems.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.